July 10, 2011

This blog doesn’t function as per its initial or revised intent. Sorry about that. However it serves for now as an oppotunity, before google plus incorporates blogger and I shift to managing my online profile via the big G and the big G alone (nestling up to giant cyber bosoms seems to be the most comforting way to exist online) for me to do what seems to be now a big cathartic vent type thing (there is underlying catharsis in most of my blogs I suppose, but I’m far too stupid to learn lessons).

It’s 2am for me right now, and whilst I’ve shifted into a nocturnal creature due to being off work I sort of would prefer to be asleep and getting a stable day/night relationship reestablished than doing this. Nothing goods from writing emotive blogs, emails, letters late at night. There is a fallacy that I have often prescribed to in which the written word is somehow the cleaner, more clinical and considered method of communication. There is an immediacy concerning verbal conversation, there is a subtle nuance to tone of voice and body language which I’m not good with so I like to write. That is rendered bollocks by the fact that when the urge to say something somewhat cathartic comes about all I do with writing is confuse and convolute matters. I can’t utterly refute the notion that this might not be the fact that forms of communication have failings but rather the failings lie with me and how I interact with everyone in the world. In fact an exploration of that very notion is at the heart of the aim of this blog as I considered starting it.

I was going to write about writing. You may have noticed I say I’d like to write and get published as per the pipe dream I mention as a way to validate the current state of my existence and to use to ward off the mind crushing prospects of my current reality. I’ve been writing quite a bit with a view to sending to a publishing house these past while. It isn’t going so great, ideas don’t stick, my writing sucks and I mismanage timings and what not (a long time prioritising a novel idea that I subsequently rejected has robbed time I would’ve devoted to other ideas). Writing with an eye to publication is odd, there is a set of considerations about style, tone and content which need to be met with regards the prospect of a sale. I was going to write this blog about writing because I can’t get the tone right for the idea I’m on now. I like the idea allot, I desperately want it to work and pull it off, the plot whilst not revolutionary is solid and the characters are spot on but I want there to be a flavour to it which I’m not feeling in what I’m writing. I have lines of dialogue, turns of phrase in the narration that hit the right notes but a cohesive tune doesn’t exist just yet. So I was going to talk about that and what not but I got to thinking, which, whilst not unheard of, is always without fail dangerous for me to do.

When I was writing the Space Soap Opera “Bride of Kharn” earlier this year, after somehow lucking out and getting publisher interest from a submission I made (which alas went no further than a polite (yet unhelpfully vague) rejection), I realised that rather than being an aspiring writer, I was actually more akin to a pragmatic fantasist. (If we’re being honest (read hurtful) deluded, deluded person probably fits better than “pragmatic fantasist” but I’m trying to manage my portrayal to come out of this with face.)

What do I mean by this distinction? Well for one thing whilst I do read about writing and storytelling, most of that has happened after the resolve that I could maybe make a hash of selling and a lot of that happened after Bride of Kharn was sent off to the publisher and I was running high on the self-delusion it wasn’t terrible (if you are one with critical faculties this self-delusion the ability to psyche yourself up and belief in your creation is necessary as otherwise you will submit nothing to anyone at all). I am no student of the written word (outside of formal academia), what I am is someone who reads a fair amount of books and comics, watches far too much TV and probably spends an unhealthy amount of his alone time thinking and living scenes and stories in his head (some of which I write down somewhere just as a way to express them). If this was the matrix I’d not take any pill I’m happy to depart from reality of my own vocation without chemical assistance. Now I live with a creative process, an urge to have stories and characters and things in my head that are not real but I find enjoyable and for whatever strand of reasoning you wish to pin on me (depending on cynicism levels I can talk myself out of writing by undermining the reasons I have for doing it) I have done things with an eye to bending such a thing towards achieving the goal of publication. It’d be really trite and crap to say “it is my gift it is my curse” and suggest that I have a spidermanesque responsibility to turn my imagination into some sort of content for a wider audience to (hopefully) enjoy, but that is pretty much the best way to put it.

Which leads me to an interesting crux in this whole crazy thing. If writing (or indeed all art) is about the creator communicating an idea or emotion through their work to elicit a response in the audience and I mostly write/imagine to serve my own needs and desires surely there is a gap whereupon all my endeavours are doomed to fall through?

I don’t have an answer, I think “I’m communicating this to people” is always on my mind when I write with regards stuff I’m sharing. (Well not so much this rambling babbling nonsense but no one apart from you reads this blog anyway and to be honest I’d rather you stopped so I wouldn’t feel guilty about not updating.) Which is often why ideas get dismissed or I get frustrated and annoyed at my lack of abilities to achieve the objectives. I won’t say I have a talent with regards the writing, when I was fresh out of school maybe, teachers and the like said I had but talent suggests an inherent skill which I clearly am lacking in. I like making distinctions, mind numbingly petty distinctions, real pathetic “why are you being such an arse making such an arbitrary distinction” sort of shit. I’d say I have a set up in my mind that is well suited to the task of writing. I read allot, I write a bit and I think constantly and imagine all sorts. It is something I can do, but I need to work at it to do it well which is fair enough and the same boat as every other published author and hopeful scribbler the world over, I am nothing if not ique (as opposed to un-ique).

However that aside aside, maybe there is something fundamentally wrong with me that will undermine all these efforts. I relate to people as an outsider primarily. I have socialised online over in reality since I was 14 years old and that is now a decade of keeping people at bay in reality. I don’t talk, I don’t emote to people. What I do do is cultivate the experience where I can reckon that cathartic writing of emotions in say an email may not help matters but other than that nothing really. I’ve found myself in the catch 22, where I don’t know what is best, I want to be there personally to help and comfort and offer intimacy and immediacy to someone who is upset but if I am there I’d want to be apart and communicating via a screen where I can consider what to say and bide for time and know I will be saying something likely better than I would make up instantly. That said that catch 22 only exists because I was emotionally invested in achieving a “cheer the person up and comfort them” result, where upon you could say I’d avoid such tripfalls if I stopped becoming emotionally invested in other people.

There is likely a running theme if you know me and/or read this blog that I am a mess. I accept that I am under no compulsion to fix that. I am reasonably content brooding in the dark and distracting myself with my own creations and I don’t think anyone wins if I was to draw from specific examples of my existence to explain how fucked up I am. When I started considering this blog and it took me to this point I got upset and obsessed about those events and my shortcomings and what not, I then distracted myself by writing this damned tirade of meaningless nonsense. That is certainly a degree of win. I’d summarise what I was trying to establish and communicate but I’m not sure what that is. In fact without a painful exploration of why I am why I am I don’t know how much of a way of explanation this is. Still I am aware of a disconnect, I wonder if it is fatal, I’ll publish this anyway because I know the audience for this is typically my friends (or acquaintances with which I am friendly as a more accurate distinction?) and there is surely a decent argument with regards the disconnect with the world that I probably not as friendly and open with them as friends possibly should be. I don’t know, I only really am comfortable talking about stuff that never matters and most of you as my friends I met online where the use of the written word and the mediums on which our friendships take place (often forums) mean I can try to cultivate a wittier, more worthy of friendship persona than I likely have in reality or am expressing here. Perhaps this will lead for me to be terribly alone and abandoned by everyone?

Part of me kind of hopes it does to be honest. If I’m going to have friends longterm I probably should do better than you, you are already getting a bit annoying.

June 9, 2011

I had some turns of phrase crop up in my head at work today so I played around with them and formed some sort of really stupid bits of kind of verse. It’s not proper poetry, it’s not proper anything. But I kind of like it all.

##1##

I daydream that I am a helicopter,
That way you cannot break my heart.
Also I can fire rockets,
explosions are awesome and satisfying,
so unlike my life as man.

I stir from my fantasy and you are talking,
delivering the minutiae of your life conversationally,
every word is illuminating like UV light,
you talk and the room is covered in blood.
You’ve never been so beautiful,
I want to explode you so bad.

##2##

Statistics say that you’re more likely to be raped by a familiar person.
Why would I want to meet your family and friends when they’re violent sexual deviants?
Why are you so upset?
The conventions of society mislead you into thinking that look in your mother’s eye was love.
It’s time you learned better.
I will not wear pants or go out to dinner with your mother.
Nor should you.

##3##

We’ve all seen the movies.
The killer is already in the house.
You should really stop being passive aggressive,
like the moat and the lock on the door,
it’s a hinderance only to those who want to help you.

Yes, I’ve got a big knife,
don’t take that tone with me,
we’re the only people here, one of us has to be the serial killer.
Getting angry doesn’t make it less obvious in retrospect you know.

##4##

You should really think about the children.
The future of the planet and the generations to come.
Achieve some perspective before you act.
They’re so fucked.
Isn’t life so much more awesome in comparison?
Let’s go and burn everything.

May 15, 2011

I am now 24. I happen in real time. I involve terrorism, torture, explosions and dubious feasibility. I am just like the TV show and that is all.

Yeah, so I’m not writing for this blog with the sort of fictional nonsense that is at the heart of my best intentions (I quite like world hunger, all the intentions I have with high quality value judgements attached are self serving) so instead as I am now a day into my 24th rotation around a radioactive space thang I am going to pull an introspectivey thang. (Another one you ask yourself whilst I use the running commentary of the parentheses to assure you that this one won’t be so angsty and self-mutilation suggestive ). (more…)

April 29, 2011

Considering the title of this post there is little point working towards an awesome mindmelting twist ending shocker about the state of my being. I’m a failure, I’m a fuck up, I’m not in a good head space and I am rubbish at altering the orbit of my skull.

You may faithful reader of my wordage realised that I haven’t blogged recently despite refreshing this project to start again with the intent to blog more. This is partly because I’m a failure. I have a story in my head for episode two, it’s a love story, it has ritual murder and suicide. It’s not finished, it hasn’t decided if it wants to be darkly funny or just plain grim or it hadn’t when I last approached it which was some time ago. I’ve not achieved much this month. Sure there have been “Real Life” developments, my dissatisfaction with elements of my current employment finally came to a head and I put in for a transfer to a store nearer my place of habitation. This’ll save me an hour a day at least in commuting which is quite decent and give me more time to do other things, and carve out an existence outside of the monotonous hell of working for money. I also traded in a car I liked driving for a smaller car that isn’t a bad drive and has neat features but isn’t so much me. It is however saving me over £400 a year on tax to have this new car and does twice the mileage on a tank that is cheaper to fill than previously so it is over all a win for my bank balance which is good news and to be honest I didn’t really like the other car that much anyways. I only ever realise my preferences in retrospect and even then I never like anything enough for it to really make me rueful of my decisions. I’m not really a fan of having wants, likes and desires. Holding them seems like an arseholish thing to do, there is a sense of entitlement when holding one of those abstract things too dearly which doesn’t run right with me. The Rolling Stones sang “You can’t always get what you want” and that’s pretty true, you make do so over all the new car is a win, and winning is good.

However in the secret shadow life of crazed fantasist turned writer of words there has been no progress. I am in a fucking bad mood, a dodgy state of the head that has lasted for ages. It is getting in the way. When I’m good I get by with 4-6 hours sleep, going to sleep around 2am that gives me a decent chunk of morning before I leave for work sometime afternoon. However whilst this initial 6-8am wake up happens anyways when I’m not in the best of moods I’ll cheat myself out of the morning and stay in bed until 10am. That’s been happening allot. No matter what I intend to get on with it doesn’t get done, I won’t get home from work until almost 10pm, by the time I’ve fed and watered myself I’m not in a working mood, I’m tired and I feel semi-socialble and with all my friends and loved one existing predominantly online for me to interact with, well that’s the evening/night eaten away to the procrastination amplifier of the internet. This happens regardless of my mood, though if I’m enthralled with a project the project takes precedence for research and writing and playing around with.

Civilisation IV is what happens when I’m in a bad mood though, it cuts me off from the friends and folk, and I can just widdle away my time playing a game. It’s fun, it has me avoiding talking to people which is always a plus because my tolerance for interaction is low when I’m in a bad mood. Heck its low anyways, it’s why I do it on the internet so I can take time before responding, don’t have any bodylanguage issues and I can blag a semblance of human decency. It’s why I’ve socialised online since I was 14 years old, which means I’ve been actively retreating from real world interactions for almost a decade now. That’s some failing in my personal being there. Christ mightn’t be fictional but when I think of things like that it is clear I am quite pathetic. So yes, I’ve played quite a bit of Civ4 the past few weeks. In the meantime short stories and novel pitches have stopped, they exist as loose collections of notes and really sketchy drafts requiring tightening, which should’ve happened over the past 4 weeks were it not for me being ridiculously pathetic. The blog hasn’t moved. Heck I’ve managed spates of an hour or two of productivity and it’s waiting to be polished and moved online (Lucy on the bolthole did a decent “Lets make an Ad Mech codex” type thread and I have a page of notes on the Skitari with suggested rules and fluff and background and what not which I’m fairly happy with but haven’t put onto the computer or posted up on the forum or done anything with despite my intentions to do so for the past three weeks almost.

What this isn’t is writers block, I get ideas, I have sat down and written for 20 minutes or so at a time before giving up. Not everything I write is good, mostly I don’t like it and it doesn’t get published anywhere and I just write more of something else. This blog was meant to up my “getting stuff out there and garnering feedback” rate especially considering Bride of Kharn is out there being judged as a complete entity and it is my desperate attempt to justify the shitty position my life is in with “but I’m making an effort to do this writing thing which I enjoy and I don’t think I’m terrible at so it’s OK that my job is rubbish and I live with my parents and all the other issues that plague my confidence with my life exist”. This is me being a fucking pathetic creature who can’t muster a steely reserve of self discipline when he’s experiencing a period of low mood. I’m in a bad mood I don’t like my writing as much anyway, so I give up and retreat into pathetic courses of action that achieve nothing. Lack of achievement cheats me out of any buzz which I can use to build momentum to get on with stuff. It’s a viciously retarded circle of behaviour/emotion that I find inexcusable. I know from times doing “courses” on mental health following some of my previously dodgy times that blaming myself isn’t helping but it’s my natural state of being.

I don’t know why I’ve written all this, the royal wedding is on and I’m striving to avoid that. I couldn’t play civ4 as I have to leave for work in 5 minutes and I can’t keep track of time during gameplay. I’m avoiding my fiction projects because of the reasons I hope I’ve expressed in my undoubtedly incoherent ramble of fucking pathetic gloomy self-esteembashing nonsense. I just felt like a ramble, for the past week and a bit I’ve wondered if airing these thoughts, if just typing them out and articulating them no matter how ham-fisted those articulations are would help. This is me seeing if it does. Hopefully this weekend I can start working on stuff properly again. I’m not saying I’m going to produce stuff that will sell, it’s been a fair old while with no talk back on Bride of Kharn, I may not be there yet but I’m a fantasist, I think up crazy stuff all the time. Part of my avoidance pattern had me drafting up a list, thinking of conversion possibilities and budgeting for a new 40k army, it’s completely hypothetical but dealing with that was preferable to dealing with the real world. It seems making “writing stories” a real thing has backfired a bit in making it another thing to find fantastical methods of avoidance for but I’m still thinking of story ideas, I still get inspiration for bits and pieces every bloody day. It’d be a shame not to exploit the one thing approaching a talent I have I reckon. So I need to get working on it which means I need to steelify my reserves of self discipline really. If only I had a fucking clue how to do that.

Sorry for this post, I’ll try to keep my feelings and what not to myself in future.

March 21, 2011

He asks me if I’m listening, a faint tone of disapproval in his voice. He thinks my attention has wondered, he thinks he held it in the first place. That arrogance of his is a problem, one endemic of his profession, of his species even. Silly human doctors and their inflated sense of self-worth. I smile at the observation as I look at him, he misreads it as a smile towards him. ‘As I was saying, part of this problem might be how you are thinking. You said you find it tiresome to have to interact past people. Human interaction isn’t a hurdle to overcome, you interact with people, it’s a shared experience where you work together to both gain from it.’ His eyes bulge with expectation at the climax of his revelation, it could be hope but the man is a doctor, a doctor of psychiatry no less, he expects me to respond with awe or some other similarly reactive sentiment at his insight. I should be marvelling at how a turn of phrase I used answering his questions led to such an incisive conclusion. I should be vowing to change my ways and thanking him. I could be making process at getting out of this place if I do these things I should do. But I am not here to interact my way beyond this doctor, beyond this facility into freedom. I should be engaging with him so that we both benefit from this interaction, it’d be a falsehood to let him think he helped me, it’d just bloat that ego of his further, and his face is hideously enlarged as it is. Further head swelling would do this doctor no favours. The thought of the unfavourable swelling of the head makes me laugh; some people have noses that can be hypothetically enlarged in the most hilarious ways. The laughter is confusing, to him more so than me. It wasn’t the expected response which always worries doctors. Fatalities occur when a doctor doesn’t expect the response that happens, not so much with shrinks though but it wouldn’t do to burst that bubble. It’d be impolite, I am meant to be engaging with him, cooperating towards mutual gain. I still don’t know what to say, beyond giving the man what he wants so he can leave here under the delusion that he achieved something the only words my mind can provoke a coarse and foul. Sometimes my brain won’t make readily available the tools needed to achieve my aims, sometimes it wishes to indulge in its sense of humour. I can’t blame it, the doctor is painfully dull. Maybe that is the problem; he isn’t pulling his weight in this interaction. Giving me anything to work with, even his big point about interacting with rather than past people is nothing but a hindrance, forcing me to sit here before the expectant bulge of his smug eyes. How can I respond under the scrutiny and pressure of that gaze anyway? This can’t be fair. I rue giving him my attention now. The bird in the tree beyond the window has gone. I can’t stare enviously at a tree and its freedom. That’ll make the impasse longer and less fun. ‘Julius’ the doctor cracked first. So eager to have his expectations met ‘what do you think about that, Julius? What I just said?’ It can’t just be me that finds this pathetic? It’d be some sort of disservice to my very being to humour such pitiful neediness surely? I close my eyes and do the only thing left for me to do to keep myself entertained for the last ten minutes of my session before the nurse takes me to my room. I whistle show tunes, part of me hopes the doctor will sing along and interact with me for once rather than at me.

At some point I’ll be shifting to a proper domained version of this concept type thing but waiting until I have the time, money and sex appeal to achieve such an aim to get on with this isn’t going to do anything but waste time.

So here I am starting a fresh from here now. I deleted all the whiny/political/personal stuff that overcame this place before. To be honest I know too many people on the internet and have already had (by now really old) early attempts of blogging about stuff ruined by parents who stalked me on the internet and then emailed me about stuff I wrote to really be comfortable with spewing forth too much of my soul onto the internet like spunk onto a tissue (it’s 12:31am all my metaphors for the next hour will involve masturbation).

Anyways I wrote a little ditty, today, nothing special but I kinda still like the thought of having somewhere to publish the random bits of floatsom, jetsom and whatever it is the navy calls it when someone wanks over the edge of a ship (I didn’t think through the declaration involving masturbation in all metaphors I made the paragraph above, not that’d you’d have guessed. I am just ruining all the magic aren’t I? Well you aren’t in disneyland anymore dorothy and I’ll leave you to fit in a good wank between disneyland, kansas and Oz because if I were to make a third explicit one in this post it would set a filthy tone for the rest of the blog). Extraneous Episodes if you will, most of these will be unedited and raw because I’m a lazy fucker. It’ll be handy cos I do kinda like writing but don’t publish enough of it or get enough feedback or what not and what not and those who know me may know that I occassionally pitch send things at some editorial types and this one time, this one guy totally asked me for the full story and then I wrote the story and I am still waiting to hear back about it and most of the time I forget about it until someone I know decides to ask me about it which I mostly hate not because it brings on nerves but mostly because I don’t like the people I know and dealing with them and their stupid lives and innane questions which are born out of genuine interest in my life IS THE WORST THING IN THE WORLD EVER.

So the writing thing is kinda important so yeah this is going to try and get a bit more closer to it’s inital conceptive purpose. But don’t be worried if whiny/political/personal stuff comes up, I had a fucking personal tangent and a half earlier, you may have noticed, it’s the one where if you know me (and likely you will if you read this near the time of it’s publishing before I become super-mega-famous because of that sex-video) I’ve likely been slightly mean towards you (don’t take it personally and blow it out of perspective you bastards). Yeah that one. No it wasn’t my finest moment. Fuck you, if you don’t have anything nice to say Fuck off.

Yes that was one half of an imaginary conversation I had with a hypothetical stand in for you my audience member. A fun game would be to try and think of clever witty things to say on your half and see how the conversation scans. If you think you have a good one, put it in the comments please my dearest audience.

There should be some sort of snappy ending to this but I am rubbish so there isn’t.